The one thing that killed me, though, was he was dead-set on using RAID0 with the two hard drives; even after I told him exactly how much of a pain in the ass RAID0 can be, he still wanted to "give it a shot and see how it goes".

Good, that's about what I was finding when I was considering doing almost that same build (I was going to go with the e6850 proc though). Instead I just added some RAM to my PC and I think I will upgrade the vid card and sound card this weekend.

welp since foxconn makes the mobo's for intel, previously asus made them.. foxconn must be the best.

they also make the boards for dell, hp, apple, ps3, xbox, etc. thus all of those machines must be the best.

anything else, regardless if they want to do SLI, sucks.

Click to expand...

I don't doubt that foxconn would be a recent maker of intel boards. But that still doesn't put the intel board in the same class as a foxconn board.
It's just like when sears contracts the work out for craftsman tools. They use SK tools, and Snapon as their suppliers.
And the last time I saw a consumer reports matchup of 12" ratchets, the craftsman beat both the SK and Snapon in how far it took to break them, even though they are the suppliers.

In this case, there's even more reason to expect a better product. Intel designs the board, and obviously is going to be more familiar with the cpu than anyone else. It's reasonable to expect the intel branded board to work at least slightly better than the competition.